


sleep tight: the bible

by somehowunbroken



Series: sleep tight [8]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Gen, Primer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 15:51:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11901015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somehowunbroken/pseuds/somehowunbroken
Summary: All the odds, ends, and errata that don't fit into the series.





	1. How each team deals with magic/wards/etc.

**Author's Note:**

> at long last, here's the bible i've been blabbering about on tumblr! this is not a story, not at all. this is, instead, a collection of information that has shaped and filled the background of the world that "sleep tight" takes place in. there's information about every team, some about specific players, and a whole lot about magic itself. i hope y'all find this enjoyable!

####  **Anaheim Ducks**

The best defense is a good offense, if you ask the Ducks. Their magical system is run more on upkeep than any sort of managed system; what these two things mean, in conjunction with each other, is that the practitioners in Anaheim just keep feeding power into what's already there, and what's already there is set to make the visitors feel very, very uncomfortable.

####  **Arizona Coyotes**

Arizona's magic draws a lot of its power from the sun. It lets them do a lot with a relatively small group of casters and breakers; since the power comes from an outside source, they really only need to direct it into the proper channels. It makes the entire arena glow like a tiny, much less powerful sun.

> Arizona's arena glows like crazy if you're really looking at it; they do something that's strengthened by all the sunshine they get down there.

> (from "sweet dreams and flying machines")

####  **Boston Bruins**

The Bruins take a lot of care to protect their players from magical damage. Virtually all of their wards are centred around keeping magic out of TD Garden; it's difficult, because Boston's a place with a lot of history and a lot of magic settled into the frames of the buildings. The Bruins do a pretty good job of it, all told, but it takes its toll on their players in other ways. There's no physical protection there, and all of the magic-dampening they have going on means it's hard to carry personal wards there, so you sometimes see some pretty terrifying injuries there. It's the price you pay, sometimes.

####  **Buffalo Sabres**

The Sabres are largely a hodgepodge team made up of cast-offs and nobodies from other teams. It's part of why everything there has been so chaotic; it's hard to take people from different hockey systems and make them play the same style, and it's the same with the magic that they're used to. It's more of a live and let live system than maybe it should be; players rely more on personal wards and home-brewed protections, because the things offered by the team are pretty basic. Things have started turning around since they drafted Eichel, but it's still kind of a mess. They're working on it.

####  **Calgary Flames**

Calgary very heavily considered going with the theme and trying to do things with fire, but someone wisely pointed out that they played an ice sport, so they left that kind of magic to the Miami Heat. Instead, they've got sturdy warding built up out of the land, more a protection of the building as a whole than anything more individualised. A lot of the players carry their own personal protections; luck charms aren't allowed, but that doesn't mean that you can't have a ward to keep you from breaking a bone or something.

####  **Carolina Hurricanes**

There's a lot of weather-related magic in Carolina. This is for obvious reasons—how could you name a team the Hurricanes and not have weather magic—and for less obvious ones: they were in Hartford, which isn't on the coast in Connecticut, but they were called the Whalers, so they clearly had ties to the ocean. Having that basis for the magic means it can be erratic at times, but it's strong in unpredictable ways. It's also part of why efforts to move the team somewhere landlocked have, to date, failed.

####  **Chicago Blackhawks**

The Blackhawks have tried a lot of different forms of magic over the years. When they started out, to nobody's surprise, they tried to use Native American and First Nations magics; these things aren't actually the same and don't often play well together, to the surprise of the white guys in charge and not too many other people, so they abandoned that pretty quickly and moved to a mostly more conventional form of magic. They never really let go of the original idea, though, so the magic there sometimes backfires on the players. It's never harmful, not really, but things would work a lot more smoothly if the people in charge would just stop trying to appropriate things that aren't theirs to have.

####  **Colorado Avalanche**

The Avs have a strange mixture of magics; they came from Quebec City originally, so everything's built on a very Quebecois system of magic, but it's all fuelled by the more standard North American magic at this point. It makes it difficult to figure out any breaking points, but once they're found, the spellwork is actually kind of fragile. They're working on it, but then again, that's what everyone says.

####  **Columbus Blue Jackets**

The Blue Jackets' magic is, oddly enough, anchored to their coach. It's part of why things there are so volatile; coaches in general don't have the longest-tenured jobs in the League, and Columbus coaches aren't winning any awards in that field, either. It's sort of settled now that they've had Tortorella there for a while—but then again, it's anchored to  _ Tortorella _ , so there's heavy emphasis on it being  _ sort of _ settled. It works for them, for the most part.

####  **Dallas Stars**

The Stars have a strange amalgamation of nature-based spellwork. They were originally based in Minnesota, so they have things rooted deep down below where the ice would settle in the winter, but as they've been in a warmer climate, they've transitioned to using more sun-based things. (They are the Stars, after all, and what better star to use?) The combination sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, and it's not really predictable. They'd be better off if they broke everything down and started from scratch, but people are really fussy about thinking you're trying to take their history from them, even when it's actively hurting people.

####  **Detroit Red Wings**

It's easy to fit in in Detroit, because their magic was forced a long time ago to adapt. It's a great thing, when there are players there to support it; it can be kind of a mess when there aren't. The magic in Detroit doesn't turn any player away, but it demands something in return, and when the players on the ice don't have enough extra to give, it shows in their play. The magic is never overtly harmful, doesn't cause injury, doesn't curse anyone, but it has to draw its energy from somewhere.

####  **Edmonton Oilers**

Poorly, at least at the start of the series. Their warding was originally put into place as a frantic countermeasure to Puck's presence, which means that it's altogether ineffective, since prevention after the fact is actually useless. It was a hodgepodge of spells stacked upon spells, layers of useless magic that were all directed at protecting players from a curse that didn't exist. And, of course, since management was so invested in keeping it a secret from people outside of the organisation, a lot of effort was put into misdirection and concealment. None of the fans or visiting teams ever found out about Puck while it was still there.

Now, though, Rogers Place is warded to hell and back again for good measure. They were already warding things when Puck was cast out, and they definitely stepped up their game when everyone found out that it had been a demon, not a curse. The building is a virtual fortress, and all spellwork that isn't registered with the team just does not work in the arena.

> They're spelling charms and wards into every block of Rogers Place; it'll basically be impossible for what happened with Puck to happen again in Edmonton. They'll be able to rebuild in peace for the first time in their history.

> (from "burn your kingdom down")

####  **Florida Panthers**

The Panthers' magic is very much taken from the land. The Everglades are full of a lot of things that want to kill you; a lot of those things were invoked when the spellwork was initially set up in Sunrise. It was strengthened by proxy when Jagr showed up; having someone with that much power in one place for so long definitely had an effect. They're all crossing their fingers that there's no backlash now that he's moving on, but time will tell.

####  **Los Angeles Kings**

The Kings' magic is based around what the coach and GM and player representatives work out before the start of each season. In theory, this is great; it means everyone has a say. In practice, it generally works out great for about half of the team, and leaves the other half struggling to fit into the wards. In the past, they've won enough that the matter has been brushed under the rug, but it's definitely being looked at after the past few seasons under the Kings' belt.

####  **Minnesota Wild**

The Wild's magic is unique in that it's very much rooted to the ground upon which the arena is built. There are a lot of protection charms on the ice itself, and a lot of complicated spellwork that diverts negative energy and spellwork into the ground and out and away.

> "Minnesota's got their spellwork rooted down through the ice, through the concrete."

> (from "sweet dreams and flying machines")

####  **Montreal Canadiens**

The Habs' magic was designed very specifically to be inclusive. They're based in Quebec; for a long time, a large percentage of their team was Quebecois. They're used to magic being all-inclusive, and therefore, their team wards are designed around that, too. It helps and it hurts; nobody on the team is left out, but it can be less than perfect at warding against things other teams bring onto the ice. Not that they'd ever do that, of course; it's against League policy to use magic to directly affect players, their equipment, or any part of the arena. It's in the rulebook, so that means it never happens, right?

####  **Nashville Predators**

The Predators are based in a city of people who are only passing through and people who will never be anywhere else, and their magic is a weird reflection of that. Parts of it are rooted into the building so deep down that it would be difficult to remove it; parts of it seem to be strung through the rafters, easy to pull down if you know what you're doing. Because of that, even their wards have wards, and anyone who tries to dismantle something in the building ends up very visibly Predators-colored. It makes them easy to find even if they try to run.

####  **New Jersey Devils**

The Devils have an interesting situation. The Prudential Center isn't anywhere near the Pine Barrens, where the Jersey Devil is supposed to reside, but since their name and mythos are drawn straight out of local lore, they can draw a lot on the environment around the arena for whatever they need. It's a dangerous balance at times; whether or not the Jersey Devil is real, the magics in the Pine Barrens definitely are. The Devils are generally safe from whatever outside forces want to hurt them, but they're not always as safe from the forces that protect them. In retrospect, it probably wasn't a good idea to align themselves with something literally called "devil," but it's a little too late to turn back now.

####  **New York Islanders**

The Islanders' spellwork was, at one point, fairly standard. As time went on and the spellwork associated with the team became more intense, though, Nassau Coliseum started crumbling beneath the weight of it. As such, the Islanders' spellwork is now bound entirely to the guys who play there. All of the protection charms and wards are keyed to the team as a unit and to each player individually. This way, the team figured, even if they have to move around, the spellwork will remain solid, and it'll be easy to make sure new guys are protected as they come. (They don't know it yet, and the League is years from realising it, but this is the future of team spellwork.)

####  **New York Rangers**

The Rangers have some interesting ideas about magic, in that they focus more on individual player magic working together than on a lot of bigger, team-wide things. It's not the worst way to approach magic; everyone brings something to the table, and they all figure out how to work together. The problems come when there are too many people whose magic isn't strong enough, because there's no overlapping spellwork to cover them all. One or two people are fine, because the spellwork of the rest of the individual players on the team can cover them, but when you start getting more than that… well, spellwork can be stretched too thin.

####  **Philadelphia Flyers**

The Flyers are an interesting case largely because the magic used in Philadelphia isn't team-specific, it's sports-focused in general. In the late 70s, someone in the Philadelphia sports world convinced owners and management of the four major league teams there—the Eagles, the Phillies, the 76ers, and the Flyers—that it would benefit all of them if they combined to use more powerful magic that would benefit all four teams. The problem with this idea, of course, is that the more powerful the magic involved is, the more complicated it becomes, and the more prone to error it seems to be. Add to that the teams' unwillingness to continue to work with the original team of casters when some of the original spellwork was called into question, and you get a system of spellwork that served its intended purpose for a very short amount of time and has since degraded to the point where it's now detrimental to those teams.

The teams would be better off breaking everything that's there and starting over again, doing something more traditional and less complex, but the entire magical topography of Philadelphia has now mutated to accommodate the sports magic, so undoing it is possibly more dangerous than leaving it be. Philadelphia is always on a precipice, and all of the magic performed in any sports arena there is a stopgap measure to  prevent the whole mess from collapsing. There's actually very little protection in place, because all of the magical effort is spent on keeping the magic in the area from becoming the problem.

####  **Pittsburgh Penguins**

There's a bubble around Consol that's in place strictly to keep the bad things from getting in. They didn't start with Sid, but they did get worse when he was drafted; now, the Penguins have an entire team of casters and breakers working together just to maintain their wards, and to fight off any of the more heavy-duty stuff that gets thrown at them. All of the players who have magical aptitude in either discipline are taught how to draw upon the wards' energy to help in case of an emergency.

> There's a faint magical aura around it, which isn't surprising in and of itself; most sports arenas have wards that sync to the colors of the teams that play there. Ryan stops and stares at it, watching as the black and gold seem to pulse around the edges of the building, fighting off something that's actively attacking.

> "Shit," he breathes out, reaching up. He's not sure what he's going to do, exactly, but someone grabs his wrist before he can even start to cast a spell.

> Ryan jerks his hand away and whirls around, his fight or flight instinct kicking into high gear. He can feel his eyes widen a little when Sidney Crosby holds both of his hands up and backs away a little, smiling sheepishly. "Sorry, sorry. I just… it's not a good idea to mess with the wards."

> "Something is," Ryan starts, waving up at the arena again.

> Crosby nods. "Look, though," he says, pointing back.

> Ryan turns to look, and as he does, Crosby whispers something under his breath. A thin chain of golden light shoots from the area where the attack seems to be concentrated, piercing the suddenly-solid green ball of energy, and when it bursts through the other side, the chain wraps itself around tighter and tighter until the ball seems to deflate and disappear.

> [...]

> "We get a lot of random shit thrown at us, so we ward the hell out of the outside and screen for abnormal spellwork on everyone coming into the building."

> (from "sweet dreams and flying machines")

####  **Ottawa Senators**

The Senators have a weird mix of old and new magic. It's sort of like the situation with the Capitals, in that they have to work around the governmental spellwork, but it's also different, because Canada's spellwork is rooted more in people and needs and function (whether that's up to date and actually working is anyone's guess [spoiler alert: no]), where the US tends to root its governmental magic in tradition and history. The Senators are more a part of Ottawa than the Capitals are in Washington, though, so their spellwork is woven in and through the spellwork of the city. It's why no team rises and falls with their city quite like the Senators do.

####  **San Jose Sharks**

The Sharks have fallen into some interesting magic, mostly by accident. Their original warding had been created by the original team, and then kept up by the veterans there' when they retired or moved on, it was shifted to different vets, different players. It means that the magic is always shifting and changing, but it's also always very stable, since the players all know what's happening. They're preparing for a shift heading into the new season; Marleau isn't there to hold his part of the magic anymore, but they'll be okay. Pavelski's a good anchor, too.

####  **St Louis Blues**

The Blues' magic has been set by the same family in St. Louis since the team was founded. This has advantages and disadvantages; everyone in the family knows how everything works, so there's no outside influences or newcomers to mess things up, but if there's something they're not sure about, things can get dicey. Nothing really bad has happened there, and there's not really a sense of the other shoe waiting to drop, but management is quietly looking into ways to fortify things just in case.

####  **Tampa Bay Lightning**

For a long time, it was like nine messes stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat, and anybody being honest about it will tell you that.

> Jo thinks about the fractured, fragmented mess that is his team's magic. It's all holes, is the problem. There are plenty of places, but he's not sure there's enough fabric left to knit himself into.

> //

> "Someone has to be able to do something," Jo says. He throws a spark out, and they both watch as it fizzles out. "This can't hold. Something is going to happen."

> "Nobody can hurt us," Bishop starts.

> [...]

> It makes Jo stare a little. He's not sure how Bishop can't already tell. "It looks like it's all about to snap," he finally says. "Like… like it can't hold itself together for much longer."

> (from "cut out all the ropes")

 It's much better these days. When Jo fixed the magic, he tethered it to the players; that way, everyone has an equal stake in it. It's not a perfect system—trades happen—but it's way better than what they'd had before, the responsibility for the team's magic being the responsibility of one person. 

####  **Toronto Maple Leafs**

A team grounded entirely in how non-magical it is. Ontario exports a lot of limestone; the ACC and all of the Leafs' facilities are built with enough lime in the structure that it's actually impossible to cast a spell if you're inside, and anything that comes in from the outside is automatically dampened to the point of being ineffective. Part of the reason the Leafs very rarely bring someone straight from the draft into the lineup is that it takes some getting used to. Unless, of course, you're Auston Matthews, and magic is a thing that happens to other people and not you.

####  **Vancouver Canucks**

The Canucks' current magic has a lot of First Nations magic tied into it; unlike the Blackhawks' experiments with it, though, they got actual First Nations people in to work it, so it's held up. They have the tendency to completely uproot and reset their magic in different ways every decade or so, because someone at some point equated their spellwork with the way their team performs; if they're doing well, the spellwork stays strong, but if they start going downhill, the magic will take a turn for the worse. The current spellwork is holding pretty strong despite their recent records, but it's only a matter of time before someone gets antsy and unravels it all to start from scratch.

####  **Vegas Golden Knights**

Everything there is new, bright, shiny. It's also all a work in progress, which can be dangerous when it comes to magic and wards. They're working with a team of practitioners, half League-appointed and half not, because they know the recent odds for expansion teams. You suck; sometimes you suck enough that you're moved. Sometimes that happens twice to the same city. They're trying to put every possible protection in place. Time will tell whether it helps or not.

####  **Washington Capitals**

The Caps have to be very, very careful with their spellwork; since they're located in DC. There's a lot of really complicated spellwork in the heart of DC, and it fades as you travel away from the political center of the US, but that doesn't mean it's actually weak. Every corporation or team that wants to cast its own spellwork has to have it regulated carefully by a government oversight team, and, well. There are more than a few people who mutter about that being the reason no team there ever wins in the long run.

####  **Winnipeg Jets**

The original Jets took their name pretty literally; a lot of their warding was based around light and air and currents. It's a little too simplistic to say that they were moved because they didn't ground themselves well enough, but a lot of people had that thought in the back of their head when the Thrashers relocated there in 2011. Their magic now is about the place and the city and the people, rooting it there like it never had been before. The team has a connection there, now, and the city rises and falls with the team like it didn't before. They're okay with it as long as they get to keep it.


	2. How North American magic works

####  **Determining your magical type**

It's part of the North American schooling system, so every kindergartener knows what they "are" by the end of the first week. There are a bunch of tests when you enter: do you know your letters, can you count to ten, what are these colors, try to make a glowing light like mine, try to make my glowing light go away. There's a score for everything; depending on how you score on each test, you get placed in a reading group and a math group and a magic group. Kids who score higher on the casting test are casters from that point forward, and kids who break are breakers. Kids who show little to no magical aptitude are in their own group. (It's a much, much smaller group; most people can do at least a little magic.) There's nothing you can specifically do to become a caster or a breaker; people are good at what they're naturally good at, and if your educational institution fosters growth of the thing you're good at and tells you to not worry about that other thing, well, a kindergartener isn't going to effectively argue with it.

Homeschooling works for magic much the way it does for every other subject, in that whoever's doing the schooling researches the topic and teaches it or finds someone else to teach it. This leads to an interesting correlation: there are more homeschooled kids who end up being balanced magic users than ones who end up as either a caster or a breaker. This depends, of course, on who's teaching them, what they can do themselves, and what they believe; the stats don't lie, though.

####  **Magical details**

Theoretically, there's no limit to how powerful someone's magic can get; the issue becomes how well someone's body can handle holding all that power. There are certain ways to store energy outside of yourself, but the process can be draining, and you can never store more than you can actually hold at once, so it becomes an exercise in building up your ability to hold magic as much as it does knowing how to use it.

There's no strict ranking system for magic users; kids will sometimes identify themselves by grade level, just as they do for math or history, but it's not like you ascend through ranks as you learn more. It's talked about like people with other talents are talked about: he's a piano virtuoso, she's a brilliant mechanical engineer, they're a world-class breaker.

If you have magic, you can't lose it; it can be taken from you, but that's an  _ incredibly _ rare form of punishment. A lot of people think it's inhumane, and there's a lot of debate surrounding whether or not it's ethical. People feel very strongly on both sides of the argument. Though you can't lose it by any natural means, it's just like any other skill you have: it you practice, you'll get better at it, but if you choose not to, you won't be as good at it. You can pick it up again later in life, though, and get pretty good at it again.

####  **Casting**

Casting is one half of North American magic. It's what it says on the tin: the ability to make spells happen. Casters in North America start off with really little things: making tiny flickers of light appear, making shadow puppets, mending small tears in fabric. The most powerful casters can do things that most regular casters find hard to believe; magic is a combination of energy and knowing how to use it, and most people tap out when it becomes more of a job than a tool. Almost any caster can, say, reheat a meal with a thought; it takes someone with a whole hell of a lot of power and dedication to create a feast out of thin air.

_ Casters: _ Dylan Strome, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Nathan MacKinnon, Jeff Skinner, Anthony Duclair, Nico Hischier, Seth Jones, Nick Foligno, Julie Chu, Marie-Philip Poulin, Amanda Kessel, Harrison Browne, Patrick Marleau

####  **Breaking**

Breaking is the other half of North American magic. Casters cast spells; breakers make them go away. All spells have what's known as a breaking point; it's a small hole or space in the spell for the breaker to find and pull at until the spell gives. This can be done with delicacy and care or with brute force, depending on the breaker, their amount of power, and the reason the spell is being broken. If something isn't working right and needs to be fixed, the breaker can pull the spell apart gently and take out the misbehaving part; if a spell is hurting someone, a breaker can rip it apart with no care for the spell itself. This is, again, based on how much power and training the breaker has had; someone without much training is more likely to tear a spell apart, while someone with a lot of training and power can pull a single component of a spell out without bothering the rest of it.

_ Breakers: _ Mitch Marner, Jordan Eberle, Ryan Murray, Noah Hanifin, Alex DeBrincat, Jack Eichel, Sam Gagner, Nolan Patrick, Phil Kessel, Hilary Knight, Caroline Ouelette, Hayley Wickenheiser, Ashley Johnston, the Staal brothers

Casters and breakers work in tandem a lot of the time; this is a good thing and a bad thing. You need a caster and a breaker to work anything big; the caster puts the spell into place, but the breaker is the one who makes sure it's steady and stable. The problem is that casters and breakers are brought up to believe that they're so very different from each other, and they learn very little about what the other one does, so there's a big disconnect and generally a lot of arguing over the best way to do things.

> "Leave me out of the you-and-Dylan show," Connor says instantly. There's the saying about how oil and water don't mix, and there's the one about casters and breakers... those lines were drawn for them long before they chose hockey over their other gifts.

> (from "burn your kingdom down")

####  **Minimal**

If you don't fall into the caster or breaker camps, you're almost definitely going to land here. People with a minimal magical ability can tell that magic is happening; with enough exposure and some concentrated training, they can tell what  _ kind _ of magic is happening.

> She walks into the room enough to brush her hand over Connor's shoulder, and he feels the spell like goosebumps down his arm. It flexes around his fingers, and Connor honestly has no idea what in his expression and Taylor's presence made his mother think he'd need a shield, but he's not going to ask her to take it back.

> (from "burn your kingdom down")

Magic isn't something that can be learned if you aren't born with it, though; it's more like another sense, in a way. Someone born unable to hear can't just learn to do it if they put a lot of effort into it. There are adaptations that they can use if they want, and they can lead full, happy lives without ever once using magic.

_ Minimal-magic players: _ Connor McDavid, Max Domi, Steven Stamkos, Tatiana Rafter, Beau Bennett

####  **Blank**

People who are truly non-magical are few and far between. Most people can do very, very basic things at the least: lighting a candle, or putting one out. There are people who don't have any magical ability whatsoever; they tend to become really, really good at other things. Maybe it's a form of compensation; maybe it's the trade-off for not having any magical ability. Nobody's super sure, but that's because these people are pretty rare, and it's incredibly rude to be like "Hey, can we study your utter lack of magic? For science?"

There's a reason you see a lot of the non-magical community in things like sports, though: with practice, with dedication, you can become incredibly good at some things, even if you're not born into them. You can't pull magic out of nowhere if you're not born with it, but you can get really, really good at hockey. There's a sense of "they won't mind about the whole missing magic thing if I win them this giant shiny sports trophy."

_ Blank players: _ Taylor Hall, Auston Matthews, Brendan Gallagher, Brad Marchand, John Carlson, James Neal

####  **Goalies**

A lot of people, players and fans alike, are incredibly convinced that goalies become goalies because they're born with so-called goalie powers.

> "Okay," Stamkos says, nodding slowly. He turns and looks across the room. "Hey, Bish?"

> "Yo," Bishop says, suddenly right there.

> "Jon's going to get drinks with Ovechkin," Stamkos says, far more calmly than Jo had managed. "He's leaving his phone here. Can you do a…" He pauses and wiggles his fingers. "A thing?"

> "A thing," Bishop repeats, clearly amused. He turns to Jo. "What do you think, kid? You up for a _thing_?"

> "What sort of thing?" Jo asks, smiling a little despite himself. _Team_ , something inside him says. It's just another kind of family, really.

> "A tracking thing," Bishop says, shrugging. "Wherever you are, I'll be able to find you. If you need me, you think about me showing up where you are, and I'll get to you. It'll wear off in a day or so."

> Jo blinks. "That's… really high-level magic."

> "Goalies can find things," Bishop says, smiling a little. "It's in the job description."

> (from "cut out all the ropes")

A lot of goalies find it really, really amusing that people think they're born with it. Goalie practice is for learning goalie things, one of which is how to focus your entire self down into being able to find the puck. It's not hard for most goalies to extend that into their magic; they learn to find things, to be able to track them no matter where they go. Some are better at it than others, but there hasn't been a goalie who didn't have some kind of magical ability since the original NHL expansion. Goalies do have magic like everyone else; they're casters or breakers, but nobody really classifies their magic past  _ goalie _ .

####  **Outside Abilities**

An outside ability is something like Jeff Skinner's knowledge thing, or Travis Konecny's ability to make things true by believing in them hard enough. It's something totally separate from magic the way the rest of the world sees it. Outside abilities are more or less remnants in the genetic code from when someone, somewhere along the line, had some inhuman ancestry. There's very little research into it; with few exceptions, it's a taboo subject, because people have some weird hangups about sex.


	3. Player-specific information and mythos

####  **Jaromir Jagr**

Look, at this point, nobody should really be surprised that Jagr's a hockey demigod. It happens. He's one of the old-school players, a journeyman through the years, and he's got enough magic that if he'd been in North America, they probably wouldn't have let him play hockey. He's good, and all of his magic has been rooted into his hockey, so he's become more of a demigod than a human at this point. It boils down to him being almost completely impervious to injury, and gives him the ability to help teammates heal from minor things or protect them somewhat from more major injuries. It's not foolproof, but you'd definitely rather have Jagr on your team. He's a freaking demigod. Most days, that's enough.

####  **Gordie Howe**

Is a hockey god. Jagr will be, one day. There are a list of players whose accomplishments on and off the ice will lead them to this specific kind of immortality. Howe's the latest, but he's not the first, and he won't be the last.

####  **Sidney Crosby/Mario Lemieux**

> Nobody's more the heart and soul and embodiment of their team than Crosby is.

> (from "sweet dreams and flying machines")

The problem with Sid is that he's so much a Penguin that they worry about him. He can and will take on way too much; he's as good at magic as a person can be without it being required that they train in a magical field, which is one of the most dangerous things for a person with Sid's drive and commitment. There are people who say they would bleed the colors of their team; that's actually a worry with Sid. If he does too much, if they don't erect and maintain careful barriers between Sid and the Penguins magic he's constantly in contact with, then Sid will become too much a Penguin.

The Penguins are aware of this. Mario is their owner, and he was a player, and there's a reason they say he's a Penguin through and through. Nobody knew, at that point, that oversaturation could be a thing; nobody suspected, even when they started figuring it out, that it could harm a body like it did to Mario. By the time the doctors and healers figured that his magical connection to the Penguins was causing his physical condition to deteriorate, it was too late to put wards in place. Mario was then and will always be a Penguin, tied to the fate of the team.

####  **Alex Ovechkin**

Believe it or not, Ovi is a regular old human. (Most people choose not.) He's very, very powerful in that he has a lot of power upon which he can draw; however, he functions better as a battery than anything else. Russia isn't like North America in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest in terms of magic is that they don't really care if you want to train your ability or not. You can, or you can choose to go into hockey, or you can quietly live your live in Smolensk and go to school to be a teacher. It works for them, mostly, but it also leads to people like Ovi, who would be really, really prominent in the political landscape if he'd gone the magic route. He's pretty happy with his choice to go with hockey, though.

####  **Shane Doan**

Doan is in a boat similar to Jagr in that he's a hockey demigod. The difference between them is that Doan will most likely become a protector of the Coyotes one day, while Jagr has real potential to become a hockey god himself. It's not due to quality of play or anything like that; it's just that Doan's entire career was spent with the Coyotes, while Jagr was more of a traveller. Doan has ties to the Coyotes that go far deeper than anything Jagr has to any one team, and therefore, he'll be tied to that team long after he hangs up his skates.

####  **Sam Gagner**

Sam had a sort of Ryan Smyth-type thing going on for a long time. He was an Oiler; he refused, like everyone did, and he was cursed to never play up to his abilities. After Puck was cast out of Rexall, his game picked up; his 2016-17 season with Columbus was him playing his heart out, viciously happy that he was finally  _ able _ to.

####  **Mike Richards and Jeff Carter**

These two are sort of the textbook example of why it's a bad idea to mess around with magic that you don't understand. When you're young and on the same team and you think you'll be playing together forever, sometimes you do some magic that you think will make sure that happens; when you're both traded, away from your team and away from each other, the magic stretches and warps and cracks in ways that you don't know how to fix. They shouldn't have done it in the first place, so they both made the decision to keep quiet about it. It ended up not snapping and hurting both of them, but only because Jeff was traded to LA before it could reach the tipping point.

When things are good, they're good; they managed to win two Cups together in short order. When they're bad they're awful, though, and the rebound magic from their reunion only lasted so long. They finally managed to unwork what they'd cast in Philadelphia, and they're both doing okay now. (It sort of feels like they're both missing a limb they hadn't known was there in the first place, now, but they're getting used to it.)

####  **Brent Burns/Joe Thornton**

_ Was Joe Thornton's beard the result of Brent Burns' magic going awry? _

(I wanted to include the actual question I got, because I laughed long and hard every time I thought about it.)

Sadly, no, but people do speculate about it. The only magical thing related to anyone's beard, well-kept or… less so, is when people prank other people by making animal noises project from out of beards. Sometimes this is done by the beard-wearer to freak out people near them; sometimes it's done by the people near them to freak out the beard-wearer. Joe Thornton's wife once tried to bribe Patrick Marleau into making something spring out of Joe's beard that would make him want to shave it off, but it fell through when it turned out to be a scraggly little black kitten that Patrick ended up taking home anyway.

####  **Mitch Marner and Dylan Strome**

Mitch and Dylan have done something that, to their knowledge, nobody else has ever done before.

> "What's going on?" Dylan whispers.

> "I think," Mitch repeats, drawing back a little. He looks down at where their hands are joined, and Dylan follows his gaze.

> He almost snatches his hand back in shock. The cords of Dylan's magic are flowing from his fingers, circling around Mitch's wrist, and Mitch's magic is flooding around Dylan's hand.

> //

> "We didn't mean to," he says quietly, looking up at Dylan. "When we did this, we didn't know what we were doing."

> Dylan sucks in a sharp breath. "You want to—what, give it back?" He leans away a little, but as soon as he does, the droplet of his magic falls back into the pool with Mitch's as it all vanishes entirely, back into the ether.

> "No," Mitch says, reaching out and gripping Dylan's wrist. His fingers slide beneath the thread of his own magic, and he shivers as he touches it. "No, fuck. I want to… do it again, I guess, but on purpose."

> (from "cannot go to the ocean")

Sharing magic isn't a thing; sharing brains is _very_ decidedly not a thing. They don't share abilities; neither one of them is suddenly a balanced magic user now. They do have a little bit of a leg up on learning the other side of things, though, since they pretty much have unfettered access to what the other one knows about their side. They haven't exploited this to date, but the ability is there should they need it. (They're gonna need it.)


	4. Magical forms

While magic itself isn't influenced by the region in which it develops, the way people use magic tends to change based on region. It's not the geography itself that has the power; it's the people there who shape it into what it becomes who do. The lines seem to blur sometimes, but whatever magic a certain place has is a result of the magic that has been performed there, not the other way around.

####  **North American**

North American magic is—

Well. If you're gifted, a lot of people consider you lucky; if you're extremely gifted, people consider you unlucky. Your choices aren't taken away if you're a high-level caster or breaker, but things that aren't strictly magic-related are slowly stripped out of your field of options. You're supposed to be grateful that you're being guided towards your true potential. Few actually are.

North America—specifically, the US and Anglo Canada—is the only place you'll find a rigid system of casters and breakers, rather than magic users who can cast and break in near-equal measure. This goes back to the colonial era. Britain is very old-world about magic; magic has its places and its uses, but it's not necessarily an everyday thing. In the early-America days, they were doing their best to distance themselves from all things British in a lot of ways, and one of those ways was to reject the British concept of magic.

In Britain, you only used magic under a rigid set of circumstances; in America, you could use it to warm up your tea if you’d left it a bit too long, or fix a charm to the bassinet so it rocked itself, or mend a broken bit of fence with it, or a ton of other little everyday tasks that British magic would never be used for. This grew into the idea that if everyone was using it, then there should be training, and if there was training, then it should be for people to really get better at what they were already good at. It didn’t start out as being "you’re only trained as a caster or a breaker," but it did grow into that; if people were super-specialized one way or the other, then why did people need to bother with being both things?

####  **Britain**

An odd bit of trivia: the Harry Potter books still exist here, written as more of a thought exercise about what the world would be like if most people were non-magical and didn't even know it was a thing. A lot of British children, therefore, grow up pretending they're characters from the series; parents are generally longsuffering about having to explain for the tenth time that  _ accio _ isn't really a thing. Other than that, though, British magic is slowly pulling itself into modernity; the old model that the American colonies moved away from has been largely rejected, and British magic nowadays is a hodgepodge of the good things about the old system (the sense of order, mostly) and good things about other magical forms that people have learned along the way. It's diverse, and sometimes it works better than other times, but it's evolving. That's growth enough, considering how long it was stagnant.

####  **Quebecois**

Quebec is different from the rest of North America because of the French influences there. The history of Quebec and its relative Frenchness is interesting; though it has always been spoken widely in Quebec, it wasn’t the official language there until 1977. It wasn’t until then that it became used alongside English on things like road signs, even. Because of that, the "you’re here but you’re the quiet part of society" attitude, the French-Canadian way of doing magic was also just quietly common but mostly unspoken. France saw no need to define people or the way they used magic; the English-speaking settlers brought with them their views on using magic to do whatever magic could do. Quebecois magic, therefore, has become a meld of the two. It’s more about using whatever you have in whatever way you can to achieve whatever result you’re going for.

####  **Scandinavia**

Scandinavian magic in general is different from a lot of world magical systems because a lot of people in Scandinavia are more open when their bloodlines turn out to be… somewhat less than human. They have a larger population of people with outside abilities than is the worldwide norm, and the magic there has adjusted to accommodate for a lot of it. It's not necessarily that Scandinavian magic is stronger because a lot of its users have outside abilities; it seems that way, but it's more that they've learned to work with all of the materials provided to them rather than pretending that everyone's super regular old human, thanks, nothing special to see here.

####  **Russian**

Russian magic is closer to Quebecois magic than standard North American magic. It's casting and breaking, and a lot of it is intertwined with fairy tales. Non-magical kids learn to animate their ghost stories with shadow puppets; in Russia, gifted kids do the same thing, but they don't need their hands to do it. Any Russian magic user can cast and break with ease, and it's really, really weird to most of them that North American magic users can't.

This is, interestingly enough, where a case study comes to light. The second they met, Geno knew that Sid had more magical power in him than most people he's ever met; he wasn't sure, at first, why Sid was even allowed to play hockey. He figures it out, that Sid just… doesn't know how to use almost half of what he's got, and he slowly starts to teach Sid things. They communicate through shadow puppet stories until Geno's English gets better; their teammates get used to shadow-foxes and bears and other assorted animals bounding over the tops of seats and occasionally curling up for naps on shoulders. Sid knows how to cast them, to make them run around, but it's not until Geno positions his hands, pulls him through the movement, that Sid finally breaks a charm.

("I can't," he says, on the bus from the rink to the hotel after a loss, Geno's first year on the team.

"Try," Geno replies firmly, one of the few English words he's made sure he knows. "Sid try."

And Sid sighs, and Sid humors him, and Sid  _ does it _ .)

Sid's a prodigy in more ways than one, so he picks it up really, really fast. He's grateful to Geno for teaching him, for helping him expand and learn more. He's just as grateful that it was  _ Geno _ who taught him, because if he'd known that he had all of this power all along, if the magical powers that be had judged the full weight of his potential as a magical user when he was a kid… well. Then he'd just be a magical prodigy, because they would have taken hockey from him.

####  **Mexico**

Mexican magic is far, far less homogenous than US/Canadian magic tends to be; they're more cognizant of the fact that they have a lot of different cultural roots, so they don't pressure everyone to learn the same things all the time. They tend to have more regional magic than you find in the rest of North America. When your magical schooling is largely left up to families and communities, instead of being sterilised and taught by rote in schools, you'll get that kind of variation.

####  **First Nations/Native American**

The native peoples of the Americas have their own ways of doing things. Different tribes have their own methods and ways of practising; just as there's no one "Native way of doing things," there's no one method of Native magic. They're as far-flung and as varied as the different peoples themselves once were.

A lot of white people don't get this; it's partially education, but it's largely ignorance. It traces back to the first days of colonisation, when the European settlers thought that their ways of doing everything were better, and assumed that the magic of the Native people they encountered was lesser than their own. Some of them thought that they'd be able to just do as the Native people did, and tried to use their ways of magic without bothering to learn the ins and outs of how it actually worked. It backfired really, really badly on them. You've heard of Roanoke, I'm sure.

####  **Differences in magic**

Most North American magic users are either casters or breakers; it's a very old-world thing to be both, and though there are some regional differences in magic, there are very, very few places in North America that don't ascribe to the caster-breaker dichotomy. People who can cast and break are much, much more tuned into their magic than people who only train one side of it, so they can often tell when magic feels different.

Nail Yakupov, for instance, had more than one kind of culture shock when he went to Canada to play major junior. He's a great hockey player, but he's even better with magic. (Had he been Canadian, he wouldn't have been allowed to play, but that's a different story for a different day.) He can tell where someone's from pretty much by being close enough to shake their hands, because the magical signatures of different places are unique, and he can feel the oil country when he meets Ference for the first time and the coast in British Columbia when he meets Nuge. It's why he and Alex Galchenyuk will always be close, even if they never play together again: they feel like home to each other, even though they're not actually from the same place at all.

People are influenced less by their heritage and more by who teaches them their earliest magic. For instance, PK Subban's magic is all over the place; he first learned from his parents, whose magic is decidedly not Canadian, and then when he started learning in Canadian schools, that influenced him as well. When you add in how close he and Carey Price were in Montreal and how much they taught each other (consciously and unconsciously) about their own practices, and... well. PK is good at magic, but nobody can get a read on him.


	5. Thanks!

Thanks, first and foremost, to everyone reading this; I had no idea when I started writing that people would get so invested in this silly magic story I was writing. It means a lot more than I can express that people were not only interested in reading (and rereading) the stories, but had so many questions about the world and how different things in it worked.

Extra-special thanks to everyone who asked questions that became part of this: thealidoyle, vidrianah, themockturtle, hockeyho, jetta, gauthboy, yipyipinvasion, camshaft22, and every anon who threw a list of questions at my inbox or left one in a comment. Some of your questions were about things I hadn't thought about, and figuring out the answers to them gave the whole world a richer, fuller, more vibrant feel. It was a true pleasure to answer your questions.

Just for clarity's sake, I'm going to list some of the questions I got that are purposely not answered because #spoilers:

-Gabe Landeskog's other-ness  
-what Ovi and Backstrom are  
-who the most/least powerful people in the world are  
-who has what exact outside ability  
-the Gabe and Skinny backstory (this isn't in the finale, but it is something I plan to write about later!)

**Author's Note:**

> the finale is just about 3/5 done. it's coming along :)
> 
>  
> 
> [follow me on tumblr for more info about the background of the story and occasional quotes as i write!](http://somehowunbroken.tumblr.com)


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